Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  He wrote at breakneck speed, over ten thousand words a week, but not at first; he had difficulty getting started. He became gloomy. “No book I wrote kept me in a more sustained bad mood (while doing it) than The Armies of the Night,” he said. His deteriorating relationship with Beverly was one reason. Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, a Harper’s editor at the time, visited Provincetown while he was writing Armies. She said that Beverly, who loved Provincetown, felt “isolated and bored” that winter. “She wasn’t very happy with that month she put in; that was very clear.” After a week or more of false starts, Mailer remembered that when Picasso began a new project, he had a way of “going off in a new direction. He was telling us a secret, which was that style is a tool by which you explore reality.” Time magazine’s brief piece on Mailer and the March, “A Shaky Start,” gave him a handhold. Accompanied by a photo of him holding a coffee cup of bourbon, and mocking him for “mumbling and spewing obscenities” at the “scruffy Ambassador Theater,” during the rally before the March, the piece made him sound like an incoherent fool, passing over entirely his humor and badinage with the audience, which “really tied the thing together,” as de Grazia recalled. He praised Mailer’s “excitement and his energy” that night, and “this particular genius he has when he’s drunk,” something the Time stringer missed. “The average reporter,” Mailer wrote, “could not get a sentence straight if it were phrased more subtly than his own mind could make phrases. Nuances were forever being munched like peanuts.” He began his narrative with Time’s three-hundred-word squib followed by: “Now we may leave Time in order to find out what happened.”

  In his freshman English course at Harvard, Mailer read a long chapter from Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (“The Virgin and the Dynamo,” probably) and, like most readers, was slightly puzzled by the perspective, but he had no memory of thinking of the book afterward. Anyone who reads Armies of the Night and knows Adams’s masterpiece, however, immediately sees the influence. “It’s as if I were the great-grandson,” Mailer wrote later. “Adams must have remained in my mind as a possibility, the way a painter might look at a particular Picasso or Cézanne and say to himself, ‘That’s the way to do it.’ Yet the influence might not pop forth for twenty or thirty years. In effect, that’s what happened with Henry Adams.” But even after he was well into the account, he found that it took an effort of will to write every day. The point of view was “damned odd,” he said, and he wrote half the book before he adjusted psychologically to this “dislocating way to regard oneself.” Finally, he got used to it, and relished employing that “part of the ego that is superior to ourselves—that person who observes us carefully even as we are doing bizarre things, that special persona, possessed of immaculate detachment.” By mid-November, the handwritten pages were accumulating, and his secretary, Sandy Charlebois Thomas, had difficulty keeping up.

  As Mailer worked in his third floor study looking out at Long Point and the Provincetown harbor, Morris and Decter waited and worried in New York, while Meredith tried to sell the book version of a narrative he was hard pressed to describe. The New American Library finally purchased it, but the advance was only $25,000. Robert Gutwillig, editor-in-chief, said this was because NAL had “already laid out so much for the novel which wasn’t being written”—“First-Born”—and “nobody, including Norman, had any idea what kind of book it [Armies] was going to be.” On November 20, Mailer wrote to Yamanishi that he thought his account might reach forty thousand words. Sometime after this, Morris, who hoped to get the piece in the March issue of Harper’s, asked for a progress report. Mailer invited him and Decter to Provincetown. When they arrived in early January, the manuscript, some of it still on yellow legal pads, had grown enormously. “I was stunned,” Morris said. “He had gone up there and hadn’t had anything to drink for a month, leading a Spartan life with Beverly, and he had turned out this incredible ninety thousand words.” Morris telephoned his managing editor, Robert Kotlowitz, to tell him and when Kotlowitz asked him how many words he wanted to run in March, he said, “I think we should run all of it at once.” Morris made the decision on the spot to run the longest piece ever published in an American magazine.

  Working twelve and fourteen hours a day, Mailer finished writing “The Novel as History” soon after they arrived. The manuscript all but completed, Beverly cooked a celebration dinner to which Mailer contributed his signature dish, mushrooms stuffed with duxelles. Morris, who was known to take a drink, brought out a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. After dinner, Mailer took Morris and Decter on a drive around Provincetown in his jeep. It was snowing lightly and few lights were visible in the almost deserted town. He drove down narrow, winding Commercial Street along the harbor to the town’s center, past the gothic town hall and the tall stone memorial to the Pilgrims, and then to where they had first landed before sailing to Plymouth, a spot occupied then and now by a huge, ghostly motel. From there, he drove to the state highway that separates the town from the towering dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore, as Morris recalled in his memoir, New York Days. It was snowing more as they turned off the highway.

  On one especially precarious dune the vehicle stalled momentarily in the sand, and we had to push it. Mobile again, as we took turns with draws on the bottle, he began talking in the redneck Texas accent he said he had acquired from back-country Texans in the Army. He rolled out in prefaces to sentences a lot of twangy “little ol’s” while gesturing sharply with his arms. He said he liked southerners. “Why did you say I had frizzy hair in that book [North Toward Home] you wrote?” he asked. “Well,” I replied, “because you do.” The motor of our conveyance began to buzz and hum a little, and the driver put his wary ear to the dashboard and said, “I think this thing has tuberculosis.”

  The only open bar in the town was at the local VFW post, and Mailer took Decter and Morris there for a drink. Morris offered a toast to the manuscript, which would be called “The Steps of the Pentagon” when it appeared in Harper’s. Mailer said, “Look, I wish you’d stop praising it. It makes me edgy”—his unwillingness to welcome good luck too lavishly always hovered in the wings. Some months later, when Fan Mailer heard that Armies of the Night had won the Pulitzer Prize, she recalled, “I said, ‘Umbashrien Got tsu danken!’ ”—God protect us from the evil eye. She said that her father had done the same when good things happened. “I had hoped he would win the prize, and then when he got two prizes, the National Book Award too, I said it again, a double Umbashrien!” As they drank, Mailer pushed Morris to publish the still-unfinished second part of Armies, “History as a Novel,” which recapitulates the entire story of the March in an objective, factual fashion. Morris told him that this thirty-thousand-word piece would work well in book form, but would be “only an afterthought” to the dramatic first part. Mailer disagreed, but was unable to convince him. He subsequently turned to his “old dear great and good friend Norman Podhoretz,” who agreed to publish it in Commentary’s April issue as “The Battle of the Pentagon.” When the threesome returned to the house, Beverly was searching for the needle of her stereo. She told Mailer that he had worked voodoo on the record player because he hated it. Mailer said nothing. He dedicated Armies of the Night to Beverly, but by then the marriage had taken another step toward its conclusion.

  SHORTLY AFTER HE finished the second part of Armies, he began his review of Podhoretz’s Making It. He found that his initial estimate had changed for the worse. He had also read the reviews. Podhoretz’s thesis is that sexual lust, the “dirty little secret” of Victorian times (according to D. H. Lawrence), had been replaced by lust for success in society, most certainly among his colleagues in The Family. He admits his own unqualified desire to be rich, famous, and powerful in the memoir’s opening pages, and then goes on to relate his life story as it pertains to his career up to the age of thirty-five (he was born in 1930). The response of reviewers to Podhoretz’s revelation of his ambition, and his final admission—thought to be candid by him, co
nsidered crass by others—that the book itself was a “Mailer-like bid for literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package” was, he said later, “very nasty indeed.” Mailer’s review, which appeared in Partisan Review just before the second half of Armies appeared in Commentary, contained some positive comments about his friend’s “agreeable variety of aperçus on matters such as status, class, privilege and clan.” While it was not “a great or major book,” he wrote, it was for the most part “very well written for much of its length.” But after these tentative plaudits, Mailer decimated the memoir.

  Podhoretz felt betrayed. He knew that Mailer was reviewing the book and thought that it would be positive, even a rave. A rave in PR, even one that appeared, as Mailer’s did, three months after the book’s publication, could offset the damage done by the book’s early reviewers, that “squalid yard of humpty-beaters and hard-ons,” as Mailer referred to them. “Here I was,” Podhoretz told Mailer biographer Peter Manso, “being beaten up all over the place, and instead of helping me when I was down, my great friend was giving me another kick in the ribs.” Mailer’s critique is two-fold, and depends to some extent on his own view of how The Family had all but abandoned its critical responsibilities in favor of an adoring but unspoken appreciation for the waves of Camp and Pop rolling across the country. His first point, however, is that Podhoretz had failed to see that in writing about himself in the motions of mid-career, he was, in effect, writing a novel. His obligation, therefore, had been to present “himself as a literary character, fully so much as any literary character in a work of undisputed fiction.” Mailer does not say—nor does Podhoretz seem to have noticed in his scab-picking rejoinders to the review—that Mailer is also referring, implicitly, to the protagonist of Armies of the Night, his own just completed work of self-portrayal, clearly labeled as a hybrid of the novel and history. Such an amalgam is tricky, he said, because readers will respond to such a character much the same way they react to characters in a novel. “One is advancing and endangering one’s career” by taking on such a challenge.

  The book is now a protagonist in the progress of one’s success. Self-interest naturally slants a word here, literary honesty bends it back there. One does not know whether to tell the little lie or shrive oneself. An overload of choices descends on the brain of any ambitious man engaged in giving a contentious portrait of himself. Yet that is not even the worst of the difficulty. The real woe is that one is forced to examine oneself existentially, perceive oneself in the act of perceiving (but worse, far worse—through the act of perceiving, perceive a Self who may manage to represent the separate warring selves by a Style).

  The connection is not made and Podhoretz fails to present himself as an American Julien Sorel, a young man from the provinces possessed of a frenzy for riches and renown, and the audacity to seize them. Instead, the reader is “forced to jog along on the washboard road of a memoir,” and consequently loses all interest as Podhoretz provides the dreary bureaucratic details of his climb to the editorship of Commontary. All that remains are “sketchy anecdotes, abortive essays, isolated insights, and note of the drone—repetitions.” The potential of presenting “interplay between ambitious perception and society” is lost, and Podhoretz’s “dirty little secret” loses its force in what becomes a “muted limited account of a young provincial.”

  “Podhoretz apes Mailer, but he is no Mailer. He is, in the end, a small bore,” says one reviewer. He lacked the narrative sophistication to write his memoir as Mailer wished him to, but this is not surprising. He was a critic, not a novelist, and it seems somewhat unreasonable to have asked him to write his book according to the specifications of an accomplished novelist who has discovered after twenty years of assiduous effort an innovative way to present himself in nonfiction. But Mailer’s other major criticism is quite fair, and devastating. Podhoretz displays a fatal weakness in the book: he flatters The Family instead of revealing the byzantine contours of its envious and brilliant self-aggrandizements. Mailer lists thirty-three Family members and notes that references to each are “invariably as attractive as the sort of remark one makes when giving a reference to a Foundation for a friend.” His portraits are “full of sugar”; he depicts “an Establishment composed of the kindest folk: into their ranks enters an ambitious Provincial—what a novel!” Podhoretz, he concludes, “deserted his possibilities as thoroughly as if Stendhal had presented the family of Mademoiselle de la Mole as charming.” Years later, Mailer said his review “was probably too cruel.” Perhaps it was, but it cast invaluable light on the involuted perspective he used to depict himself in Armies.

  Eventually Podhoretz recovered from Mailer’s review, abandoned his earlier radical-liberal politics, and went on to become a major figure in the neoconservative movement. After the review, their relationship slowly dissolved, but they saw each other occasionally. In 1979, Mailer invited Podhoretz to his home for dinner and told him that he would like his new book, The Executioner’s Song. Podhoretz answered by saying that Mailer “probably would dislike what I had written about him in my new book, Breaking Ranks. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you owe me one,’ and I laughed and replied, ‘Yes, I do.’ ” Afterward Podhoretz told his wife, Midge Decter, who had helped edit Armies of the Night, that Mailer would never forgive him for Breaking Ranks. They did not speak again for almost twenty years.

  The quarrel was soon lost in the roar of acclaim for Armies. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and a George Polk Award for magazine reporting. Among the major reviews, only John Simon and Mario Puzo were negative—even Time was mildly approving—and when Willie Morris wrote to him about the honors for which it was being considered, he replied, “Willie, if I ever get the Pulitzer Prize you realize that the cows are going to come home.” Alfred Kazin’s front-page review in The New York Times Book Review, perhaps the most important and intelligent of the book’s notices, described it as a “diary-essay-tract-sermon,” and compared Mailer’s self-presentation with that of “the best American writers of the 19th century [who] talked about themselves all the time—but, in the Romantic American line, saw the self as the prime condition of democracy.” Kazin concluded with this thought: “Mailer’s intuition is that the times demand a new form. He has found it.” Published twenty years to the day after The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night disarmed the literary world and reaffirmed Mailer’s genius. The paradox of his achievement is that in a narrative that sundered the protagonist into Mailer-now and Mailer-then, he was able to unite all the actors, currents, and rich particularities of the March, seeing them through the oppositions of his psyche. This division of self by fiat, the resolution of twenty years of point of view uncertainties, was a masterstroke and the most significant aesthetic decision of Mailer’s career.

  Armies’ triumph was a succès d’estime. The book did not make the bestseller list, although it has remained in print since publication and appears on most lists of the greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Mailer’s parents saw it as a happy endorsement of their son’s talents. Barney and Fan came to the ceremony when he was awarded the National Book Award in March of 1969. Robert J. Lifton, also from Brooklyn, received a National Book Award in the sciences for his moving study Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima the same night that Mailer received his in the arts and letters category. Lifton and his wife, Betty Jean, knew Mailer and Beverly from summers on Cape Cod. Lifton recalled the ceremony, where they met Mailer’s parents: “He immediately took BJ and me over to meet them, and by then they were elderly and they came across as nice Jewish older people. Norman said, ‘This is Bob Lifton; he also won a National Book Award.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘It’s so nice that you both won it.’ I’m sure what she meant was it was so nice that another nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn also won it. That was my translation.” There was a bar backstage and a certain amount of drinking took place before the ceremony. The crowd, Lifton said, “was terrified that Norman was going to misbehave because of his
reputation for doing that. He got up and gave a choirboy speech.” Mailer said he disagreed with Sartre about turning down the Nobel Prize and, referring to himself in the third person, said, “Your speaker is here to state that he likes prizes,” seeing them as “measures of the degree to which an Establishment meets that talent it has hindered and helped.” This was especially true, he implied, in a time when society was “poised on the lip, no, the main of a spiritual revolution which will wash the roots of every national institution out to sea.” For the next few years, he would alternately warn of and welcome this revolution brought on by American hubris, and what he called in the speech the “Armageddons of technology.”

  WRITING TO KNOX a week after Armies appeared in Harper’s, Mailer said he was happy with its “pleasant” reception, and had “a few small hopes for the book.” Completing the editing of Beyond the Law, however, was his immediate concern. With Farbar’s help, he had cut it to 110 minutes, but there was more work to be done before its April 2 premiere at the University of Notre Dame. His interest in Wild 90 had all but disappeared. He had considered entering into the competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but he had already spent $10,000 on theater rentals and advertising. Very few people went to see the film, mainly because of the hideous reviews, but also because Farbar had rented a room in the bowels of a Manhattan office building that lacked a marquee. Mailer was advised by unnamed friends, he told Knox, to forgo Cannes, “because the odds against gaining anything would be very great and the perils of being wiped out enormous.” His hopes were now pinned on Beyond the Law, and between antiwar speaking engagements he worked steadily on completing the editing.